Souto-Manning examines the role of classroom discourse analysis in helping to change a teacher's perceptions of English Language Learners from students who need "fixing" to experts from whom teachers may learn. She finds that blurring the lines between teacher/student and subject/object positions opens up pedagogical third spaces that are often…

The term "Latino" in this paper adopts a U.S. definition to refer to those persons born/living in the United States who are of Latin American ancestry. U.S. Latino literature is defined as literature that is originally composed mostly in English, but not exclusively, by authors of U.S. Latino background. Selections of Latino literature in the U.S.…

Paris examines texts worn on objects (like clothing or backpacks), delivered over electronic media, and rapped by youth emcees at a multiethnic high school. He argues that these are identity texts, used by young people to express ethnic and linguistic differences. (Contains 2 figures and 7 notes.)

English as taught in city schools does not always reflect the Englishes city students travel with. Their urban English landscape is enriched by a procession of many voices that march in various directions in, around, and through the monuments of the city. These languages--Englishes, in this case--which have been traded on through various public…

Language is more than a means of representing and communicating ideas. It is subject to one's values and beliefs about language and people. For this reason, it is also a means of constructing an identity, a place of belonging in a complex world. Various authors have set forth visions of young people constructing social places for themselves amid…

Teacher-written editorial columns in local newspapers can challenge the broad, simplistic conceptions of the profession that have been encouraged by contemporary politics and that obscure the real work of teachers. The publication of such columns written by a diverse group of teachers in the West Texas Writing Project has proved an important tool…

This 5-month qualitative study investigates how one high school English teacher situated students as readers and writers within daily, spontaneous classroom interactions. Specifically, the author draws on positioning theory (van Langenhove & Harre, 1999) as a lens to analyze how the teacher navigated improvised responses during three separate…

When someone uses the term "standards," one tends to assume the topic under discussion is K-12 education, but standards for teacher preparation have their own parallel history. In English teacher education, that history has two strands: the NCTE Guidelines for the Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts, which predate the "standards…

Although many research questions in English education demand the use of qualitative methods, this paper will briefly explore how English education researchers and doctoral students may use statistics and quantitative methods to inform, complement, and/or deepen their inquiries. First, the authors will provide a general overview of the survey areas…

In "Letters to a Young Teacher," Jonathan Kozol (2007) describes the need for teachers to "speak out as witnesses to the injustices they see each day in public schools" (p. 93). Sometimes beginning teachers need help learning to see injustices, as well as in making sense of the sociopolitical systems of which schooling is a part. Or, as in the…

This article narrates a critical classroom incident between the author, as an English teacher, and her student, Rob, and discusses how this incident reflected the flaws in her teaching practices and what she did to correct it. The author shares that one of the consequences of this incident was that she began to understand that her aspiration to be…

In this frankly utopian essay, Robert Yagelski's theme is the transformative power of writing as an act in and of itself. He makes us reevaluate our motivation and point for teaching writing in schools and asks us to consider an agenda that will quite frankly scare teachers as he explains why we need an ontology of writing. (Contains 6 notes.)

In 1992, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) held a conference featuring leaders in the field of composition studies, attended by a wish list of luminaries, including Lil Brannon, Ed Corbett, Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and Ken Macrorie. James Britton and Nancy Martin flew over from England to join the conversation. The prestigious research…

Teachers are never free from metaphor. Whether or not they consciously design and choose their own comparisons, teachers' work is continually constructed in metaphorical terms, perhaps more so than any other profession. Like Kristy, whose course of study was determined by a television ad lasting less than a minute, teachers and potential teachers…

This article explores one element of collaborative practice: the integration of English language learner-focused instruction and discussion in a secondary English methods course. Drawing on the authors' expertise, they examine revisions made to a secondary English methods course to better address the academic and individual needs of diverse…